Archives for March 2016

How do pornographic images shape gender and sexual identity? Sociologist and author Gail Dines answers this question in her TED Talk “Growing Up in a Pornified Culture.”

Today people live in an image-based society and no longer in a print-based society like some decades ago. In an article published in Details magazine, entitled “How Internet porn is changing teen sex,” pornographer Joanna Angel says: “The girls these days just seem to come to the set porn-ready.” In other words, the culture is socializing young girls to be ready for pornography whether they ever end up in a porn site or not. They have been taught to hypersexualize and pornify themselves.

When you look at the hypersexualized images surrounding us, from ads to magazine covers and music videos, they all come down to the image of a sexy, good-looking young woman. Since every image has a viewer in mind, who is the target here and what message is this kind of image sending out? The answer is simple. It targets men, and the message is: fuck me.

So, before a male growing up in this culture can even speak, he’s surrounded by images of females offering themselves to him. As for young girls, when they are developing their sexual identity, they learn they have two choices: they’re either fuckable or invisible. A girl then will most likely go for fuckable in order to fit in and feel appreciated.

The second factor in the culture that plays a big role for boys, of course, is porn itself. As society moved from print porn to online porn, everything changed. Here’s another quote from Details magazine: “There is an entire generation of young people who think sex ends with a money shot to the face.” In case you don’t know, money shot is ejaculation on the face—and just for the record, it can give the woman sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea in the eye.

The Internet made pornography accessible, affordable and anonymous, the 3 As that drive demand. According to TheHuffington Post, in 2013 porn sites were already getting more visitors each month than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined. It’s a multibillion-dollar industry backed up by other industries such as hospitality, IT and credit card services. Corporations traditionally not associated with porn are behind its distribution.

A study analyzing 300 porn scenes showed that 90% of the top watched scenes contained at least one aggressive act of physical and/or verbal abuse against the woman. Dines typed the word porn into a search engine to see what would come up for a boy seeking porn for the first time. Here’s what she found in a few seconds, with free access to anyone: “The major act on virtually all websites is gagging,” Dines explains. “This is when the men puts the penis so far down her throat that she gags almost to the point of vomiting. They put a lot of mascara on her face so that she’s actually tearing and you can see the rivulets of mascara running down. As she’s chocking, he grabs her hair, pulls her towards him and says, ‘Look at me.’ This is a kind of sexual psychopath. When you think that porn is a major form of sex ed, think about what’s gonna happen to the next generation of boys, most of whom are brought up on hardcore mainstream Internet porn.”

Meatholes

A 12-year old boy that seeks porn on the Internet for the first time is certainly not thinking about gagging. But the text that goes along with the images teaches him this is what he enjoys if he wants to be a man. Here’s what a popular site advocates: “Do you know what we say to things like romance and foreplay? We say fuck off. We take gorgeous young bitches and do what every man would REALLY like to do. We gag them til their makeup starts running … And then we give them the sticky bath.”

The next constant scene the boy is going to see is violent pounding anal sex. The promotional copy for the video Annally Ripped Whores, for example, goes like this: “We at Pure Filth know exactly what you want. Chicks being ass-fucked till their sphincters are pink, puffy and totally blown out. Adult diapers just might be in store for these whores when their work is done.” This is the violence present in regular mainstream porn, as Gail Dines points out. An introduction to sex that is disturbing and traumatizing to young boys.

A standard scene is one woman and three men performing oral, vaginal and anal penetration, pulling her hair, squeezing her neck, spitting on her face and calling her names. Women are dehumanized and become bitches, whores, sluts: insatiable objects with a set of holes whose only purpose is to pleasure males, and which men are entitled to use and abuse at will. Porn literally refers to women as “meatholes.” When men no longer see women as human beings just like themselves, all empathy is gone.

This is the sex education today across the world. Dines quotes decades of research showing that the younger boys get to porn, the more it limits their capacity for intimacy, the more it decreases their empathy for rape victims, the more it fuels depression and anxiety, and more likely they are to engage in distorted sexual behavior. Those boys will become our doctors, judges and teachers one day. Think about that.

It’s already happening in fact. In her TED Talk about rape culture, Brynne Thomas exposes what goes on in campuses. Both male and female students already reflect a rape culture in their daily language. For example, rape has become a synonym for something difficult, so they say they were ”raped” by a tough exam. And there’s more. Students at Miami University published a collection of jokes entitled How to Get Away with Rape. A chant in Yale included “No means yes, and yes means anal.“ And at Saint Mary’s, this is the chant sang by a large group of students to welcome hundreds of newcomers: “Y is for your sister, O is for oh-so-tight, U is for underage, N is for no consent…”

Don’t try this at home

We have a whole generation of boys desensitized. They need more stimulation to get aroused. Torture, rape, and sex with minors are common themes used for that end. Porn director Jules Jordan, one of the most hardcore in the world, says: “So many fans want to see so much more extreme stuff that I’m always trying to figure out ways to do something differently.” Pornographer Mitchell Spinelli explains that “People want more. They want to know how many dicks you can shove up an ass. It’s like Fear Factor meets Jackass. Make it more hard, make it more nasty, make it more relentless.”

Now mind you: when porn portrays violence against women, rape and pedophilia, it doesn’t matter if it’s just a “performance.” It’s still selling the notion that those acts are not only okay but exciting, pleasurable and desirable. That doesn’t mean all men are going to torture, rape and become pedophiles because they watch porn; but they get used to the idea and start to regard it as normal.

It’s not such a large stretch from thinking something is normal to acting upon it.

The brains of pornography consumers are being wired to associate sexual pleasure with causing pain to a woman. This association gets deeply ingrained in the brain because users are actively interacting with porn through masturbation and orgasm. Here’s AC Cream’s comment in an adult DVD forum with recommendations of titles centered in “painful ass fuckin”: “The most painful scene I’ve ever seen is Gang-Bang Auditions #3 from Diabolic. The scene with Aspen Brock … The guys start asking her questions like ‘You like that dick in you ass?’, but she is in such pain her answers are hard to understand. She tried to say something like ‘I looooove iiiit’, but then the tears started flowing … A porn chick not handling dick gave me major Bone-age.” In another thread, user mehlub92 says, “I am looking for clips or movies in which the pornstar in real breaks down and starts to cry, e.g. Taylor Rain in meatholes.”

This short video brings us clips of interviews with male users. They say they learn about sex through porn, they want to try out with their girlfriends the acts they see and may even force themselves on the girls. Some think porn teaches them what turns on a woman.

Let’s see what pornstar Kelly Shibari has to say about that: “If you tried porn sex at home, nobody would have an orgasm. The point of porn sex—well, most porn sex—is showing repetitive penetration in positions that never actually touch sexually pleasurable spots.”

Journalist and male sex educator Michael Castleman explains porn actresses moan in the throes of supposed passion but rarely have orgasms. “Porn is male fantasy. It has no interest in women’s sexual satisfaction. With its rushed, mechanical, nonsensual sex, it’s a rare woman who could come. No wonder so many men are in the dark about women’s orgasms and erotic satisfaction.”

On my next post, I’ll show what happens when a group of die-hard porn fans visit a real set to watch live action featuring a trio of female performers. You don’t want to miss that! Let’s find out what turns these girls on.

What happens to a generation that has porn at their fingertips through computers and smartphones?

Just by typing the word porn into a search engine, they get 436 million results in a matter of seconds. In the 2014 BBC show Porn: What’s the Harm? presenter Jameela Jamil leads us through the biggest survey ever conducted on pornography use in the UK, with over a thousand teenagers from the ages 16 to 21 anonymously answering questions such as: How old were you when you first watched porn? How often do you watch it now? How do you think it affects what men and women expect from sex?

The answers were analyzed by leading experts in pornography Dr. Miranda Horvart and Dr. Maddy Coy. The average age for boys to watch porn for the first time is 10. Of all teenagers surveyed, only 22% saw porn for the first time on purpose; the rest was shown porn by someone else. And amid the bombarding of pornographic images in their daily lives, 24% of the teenagers said they encountered pornographic material at least once a week when they were looking for something else. Most men and women used it for sexual stimulation and masturbation.

From the entire group, 10% responded they thought that while men watch porn for sexual gratification, women watch it to learn about sex. I myself—judging by what I found in my own research—think many males also use porn to learn about sex. I remember a few mentioning they would watch girl-girl porn to that end, and they also believed porn sex was what girls liked.

In general, 30% of the boys deliberately looked for porn against 12% of the girls, and 50% of the boys looked for porn from once a day to once a week, whereas 50% of the girls never looked for porn online. Out of a thousand teenagers, 229 persons said there was nothing good about porn—75% of those were females.

How porn affects sexual expectations

Former pornstar Gemma Massey tells Jamila many girls in the industry take drugs to endure the sex scenes, and they only do such scenes because they need the money. I also heard that from countless ex-porn stars. And, like all of them, Gemma says: “Porn sex is not real. It’s not how I would have sex at home at all.” She adds that doing porn all the time mentally messes up with the person. I will discuss that in a future post.

When asked “Do you think porn affects what young people expect from sex?” 75% of the survey group said yes to males’ expectations, and 53% said yes to females’ expectations. One out of 3 top responses was that boys expected girls’ bodies to be like those of pornstars, with no pubic hair and large breasts. I would add that porn also taught boys their own penises need to be huge and deliver long, sustained erections—which naturally causes great anxiety to them. As for girls, porn has led a large number of young women to seek cosmetic surgery for vaginal lip reduction: girls as young as 12 are considering this kind of surgery.

This goes to show how porn imposes limited views of women’s bodies. A group of boys and girls participating in the survey were shown a panel with 57 molds taken from real women’s vulvas, which naturally varied in shape and size. Both boys and girls were surprised to learn those vulvas were normal: all of them thought the vulvas were abnormal or ugly. As for me, I was saddened by the fact that girls today can’t accept the very symbol of their womanhood. It’s not enough that they need to compete with photoshoped models 25% thinner than a regular woman (in old times, the rate would be only 8%), now they also learn to reject their genitals. Gynecologist Gail Busby, who conducted the experiment, discourages young girls to do the surgery: “They don’t need surgery because there’s nothing wrong with them.”

The most common answer to how porn affected teenagers’ expectations about sex was that young men expected women to behave like sex objects, and young women expected to be treated like sex objects. A 17-year old boy responded: “Guys will expect the chance for rougher sex, or for a girl to be very flexible and so on.” A 16-year old girl said: “Boys think all girls will behave like girls in porn and that a lot of quite extreme stuff is normal to do.”

In addition, the behavior of girls sexting their naked pictures has become a natural progression in a hypersexualized society that regards females as sex objects, and in which females regard themselves as sexual objects. Here, we go back to my post about the hypersexualization of children: girls send those pictures because they believe it’s what’s expected from them in order to fit in and avoid rejection.

When those sexy images leak— and they often do—it doesn’t end well. Sometimes it can even lead to suicide, like in the case of 18-year old Jessica Logan and 13-year old Hope Witsell. The lives of girls are ruined when those pictures are shared and become viral, and there are cases in which such images are downloaded and transferred to child pornography sites (on those sites, according to the UK Internet Watch Foundation, there are photos of victims as young as 3 to 6 years old, which were taken by older children). When images leak, female victims face social isolation and bullying. As much as modern society likes to deem itself progressive, double standards are stronger than ever when it comes to sexuality.

There’s more to porn

If there are clear consequences for young people when it comes to sexting and posting sexual images, the effects of childhood exposure to porn are harder to gage. In 2014, a 12-year old boy raped his 7-year old sister after watching hardcore porn online: he said he watched it with friends and gained a desire to try it out. Sociologist Gail Dines, author of the book Pornland: How Porn Hijacked Our Sexuality, interviewed a man incarcerated for child molestation: he told Dines he wasn’t a pedophile and just wanted to try something different. His is not an isolated case. For the first time, men who aren’t inherently pedophiles are initiating sex with children.

In the BBC program, Jamil interviewed a girl in her early twenties who was raped by someone she thought of as a friend. When she went to his blog afterwards, she found out it included porn images that were very similar to what had happened to her. She adds: “For certain people who do that, rape is so ingrained in their minds that for them it’s okay.”

Lynnette Smith, a sex educator working with teenagers on a daily basis for the past 20 years, is concerned about what she’s been hearing from teenage boys. In several schools, quite often, they ask her: “If I’m being intimate or trying it on with a girl and she doesn’t like it, if I keep going and keep going, she will finally like it, won’t she?” Invariably, Smith ends up tracking the boys’ question back to porn they had watched.

There you go.

So far I’ve covered what porn does physically and mentally to boys and what stems from the interaction of boys and girls with pornographic images. On my next post, I’ll focus on females and porn.

In the meantime, you can watch Porn: What’s the Harm? for additional information and also to learn more about what the surveyed teenagers said. It’s a fascinating program.

What about you? What’s your take on porn, and how do you think it affects your own behavior or the behavior of those around you?

Jennifer Mendez at Literative: “This week’s author interview made our jaws drop, because it was no longer a simple, direct answer to our questions: it was much, much deeper. It was rewarding and thrilling!” (Wow, that’s me… I guess I was inspired 🙂